The return of Mrs. Winton to the drawing-room sent the talk off at an obtuse angle, and Edgar, having finished that important letter, came in to render the remainder of the evening hopeless to Flo; but when Henry parted from her in the hall with another lingering hand-shake, he had the feeling that something like an understanding had been established between them; and it was with a springy stride and a light heart he passed out to the nearest tramway station. The next afternoon he looked in at the office, and found the manager anxious to speak with him. It was even as Edgar had prophesied. Sir Henry Field was understood to think so highly of Henry's work that he agreed with Mr. Jones in offering him the editorship at a commencing salary of L250 a year. A bright young member of the reporting staff was named as his assistant. "If Sir Henry should ask your age," Mr. Jones advised, "you are getting on for thirty. You would pass for that, and I have confidence in you." Henry found himself returning to his rooms as one who walked on eggs, murmuring to himself, with comic iteration: "Two hundred and fifty a year! two hundred and fifty a year!" And he saw arising in Hampton Bagot a fine new villa, the pride of the place, to be inhabited by Edward John Charles and his family circle. Yet he had once been so proud of that quaint old house with the Post Office in front. CHAPTER XIII THE PHILANDERERS THE news was round the _Leader_ office like a flash of summer lightning. The most secret transactions in the managerial room of a newspaper seem to have this strange quality of immediately becoming the common knowledge of the office-boy, without any one person being accusable of blabbing. Not only so; but in a few hours there was no journalist in Laysford, from the unattached penny-a-liner, who wrote paragraphs for London trade papers, to the editors of the rival dailies, that did not know who was the new editor of the _Leader_. Almost as soon as the news had been confirmed, Edgar had penned a flowery eulogium and posted it to that mighty organ of journalism, the _Fourth Estate_, which has whimpered from youth to age that journalists will not buy it, although they have never been averse from reading--or writing--its personal puffs. Edgar showed herein either a better judgment of Henry's character than one would have expected from him, or a little touch of innocence in one so fain to be a man of the world. It is seldom that the subjects of these gushing personal notices in the _Fourth Estate_ wait for others to sing their praises; they can and do sound the loud timbrel themselves. Shyness has no part in journalism, and even the bashful young junior, who has been trying quack remedies for blushing, leaves his bashfulness outside the door of the reporters' room after his first week on the press.